About Journal of Clinical Pediatric Surgery

Journal of Clinical Pediatric Surgery

Overview and identity

The Journal of Clinical Pediatric Surgery is a Chinese-language academic journal devoted to surgery in children, published in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, China. Its Chinese title is 临床小儿外科杂志 (Linchuang Xiao'er Waike Zazhi), which translates literally as the journal of clinical paediatric surgery, and the title states its remit precisely: this is not a general paediatrics journal that occasionally prints an operative paper, but a specialist surgical journal written for the doctors who operate on infants, children and adolescents. The journal is sponsored by Hunan Children's Hospital, the large specialist children's hospital in Changsha, and it was founded in 2002. It carries the print ISSN 1671-6353, under which it is recorded in international serials directories and in the SCImago journal database, where its standard abbreviation is given as J. Clin. Pediatr. Surg.

The journal's bibliographic record is continuous and easy to trace. Volume 21 appeared in 2022, volume 23 in 2024 and volume 25 in 2026, a sequence that matches a journal founded in 2002 and published without interruption since. Issues are numbered through the year — issue 12 of volume 21 appeared in December 2022 and issue 2 of volume 25 in February 2026 — and its articles carry digital object identifiers in the 10.3760/cma.j.cn101785 series used by Chinese medical journals. For a directory reader, those details matter: they distinguish a living, regularly published specialist title from the many short-lived or irregularly issued publications that share similar names.

Founding and development since 2002

The journal began publication in 2002, at a point when paediatric surgery in China was expanding as a distinct specialty within the country's large children's hospitals. Operating on children is not simply adult surgery at a smaller scale. The patients range from newborn infants weighing a few kilograms to adolescents; many of the conditions treated are congenital malformations present from birth; anaesthesia, fluid management and post-operative care all have to be adapted to a growing body; and outcomes are measured over a lifetime, because a repair performed in infancy must still serve the patient as an adult. A dedicated clinical journal gave Chinese paediatric surgeons a place to publish case series, operative comparisons and outcome studies from their own patient populations, in Chinese, for the colleagues most likely to use them.

Since 2002 the journal has followed the specialty's development. Its pages have carried work on minimally invasive techniques such as laparoscopy, on interventional treatments delivered through catheters rather than open incisions, and on the nutritional and intensive-care support that determines whether a fragile newborn survives major surgery. The steady annual volume numbering from 2002 to the volume 25 of 2026 records more than two decades of that accumulation, and the journal's inclusion as a source journal for Chinese scientific and technical paper statistics — the national system that counts and analyses the output of China's science and technology periodicals — marks its standing as a recognised, regularly assessed title within Chinese medical publishing rather than a local hospital bulletin.

Sponsorship by Hunan Children's Hospital

The journal's sponsor, Hunan Children's Hospital in Changsha, is one of China's major specialist children's hospitals. A study of hand, foot and mouth disease hospitalisations published in Scientific Reports described it as the only tertiary children's hospital in Hunan Province, with 1,800 beds, including an 80-bed children's intensive care unit and a 60-bed infectious diseases unit. A hospital of that scale generates the clinical material on which a surgical journal depends: large numbers of congenital anomalies, childhood tumours, traumatic injuries and complex neonatal conditions, treated by subspecialty teams whose experience can be written up, compared and criticised in print.

The hospital also has a long record in Chinese paediatric critical care: in the 1970s Professor Xiangwen Zhao of Hunan Children's Hospital organised a National Collaborative Group on Septic Shock in Changsha and formulated diagnosis and treatment criteria for septic shock in children. A journal anchored in such an institution sits at the point where bedside practice, surgical training and clinical research meet, and its editorial identity reflects that position. International databases add a further administrative detail: SCImago lists the journal's publisher as the Science and Technology Association of Hunan Province, the provincial science body under whose umbrella specialist publishing in the province is organised.

Scope across the paediatric surgical subspecialties

The journal covers the full range of paediatric surgery, and its stated fields map onto the departments of a modern children's hospital. Neonatal surgery deals with congenital conditions that must be corrected in the first days of life — intestinal atresias, abdominal wall defects and similar malformations. Paediatric general surgery covers the abdomen and its emergencies, from appendicitis and intussusception to childhood tumours. Paediatric orthopaedic surgery treats fractures, congenital limb and spinal deformities and bone and joint infection. Paediatric urology handles congenital urinary tract anomalies such as vesicoureteral reflux and hypospadias. Paediatric cardiothoracic surgery addresses congenital heart and chest conditions in cooperation with cardiology and intensive care teams.

Published articles illustrate how that scope works in practice. A 2024 paper examined the factors associated with cholestatic liver injury in children with complex intestinal atresia and their nutritional management. Another 2024 study compared laparoscopic Lich-Gregoir surgery with the open Cohen procedure for primary vesicoureteral reflux in 150 children. A 2022 paper reported experience with high-grade pancreatic trauma in children, and a 2025 article reviewed interventional embolisation for vein of Galen aneurysmal malformations in infants. These are typical of the journal's content: defined clinical problems, hospital case series, explicit methods and conclusions aimed at the next surgeon facing the same case.

Article types and editorial character

Consistent with its clinical title, the journal's characteristic article is the clinical study: a retrospective or prospective analysis of patients treated at one or more hospitals, reporting operative approach, complications and follow-up. Case reports and literature reviews also appear, particularly for rare congenital conditions in which a single well-documented case adds genuinely new information, and review articles summarising experience with a technique, such as the embolisation review noted above, draw the published literature together with the authors' own cases. Abstracts are structured in the conventional objective–methods–results–conclusions format used across Chinese medical journals, which makes individual papers easy to scan and compare.

Because the journal publishes in Chinese, its primary conversation is the domestic one: surgeons in Chinese children's hospitals and paediatric departments reporting to each other in the language of their daily practice. That is a deliberate strength rather than a limitation. Operative indications, referral patterns, equipment availability and family circumstances all have a local character, and a national-language journal lets those details be discussed without translation loss, while structured abstracts and international indexing keep the work visible to readers abroad.

Indexing and bibliometric standing

Within China, the journal is a source journal for Chinese scientific and technical paper statistics, meaning its articles are counted in the national statistical reporting on scientific periodicals produced under the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China system. Internationally, the SCImago Journal Rank database, built on Scopus data, records coverage of the journal from 2019 to 2024 and classifies it in two subject categories: Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, and Surgery. Its SCImago Journal Rank for 2024 is recorded as 0.139, placing it in the fourth quartile of those categories — a modest international citation position that is typical for a Chinese-language clinical specialty journal whose citations come overwhelmingly from the domestic literature.

Those figures should be read for what they are. A journal's value to its own specialty community — standardising how a congenital anomaly is classified, reporting complication rates honestly, comparing two operations on Chinese patients — is only partly captured by international citation quartiles. The combination of national statistical-source status at home and Scopus-based listing abroad gives the Journal of Clinical Pediatric Surgery a documented, verifiable presence in both the Chinese and the international bibliographic systems.

The Changsha and Hunan setting

Changsha is the capital of Hunan Province in south-central China and one of the region's principal medical centres. A specialist journal based there serves a readership well beyond the city: provincial and prefectural hospitals across Hunan and neighbouring provinces refer their most complex surgical cases to the provincial children's hospital, and the journal functions as part of that referral culture, spreading the tertiary centre's experience back outward to the doctors who first see these children. The local disease and injury burden — including the severe childhood infections for which Hunan Children's Hospital is a major treatment centre — shapes the case mix that appears in its pages.

Placement in Changsha rather than Beijing or Shanghai also reflects the structure of Chinese medical publishing, in which strong provincial institutions sponsor national-circulation journals in their specialties. The Journal of Clinical Pediatric Surgery circulates as a Chinese journal for the whole country's paediatric surgeons, not as a provincial newsletter, and its author base, as the multi-centre articles in its pages show, extends across China's children's hospitals.

Distinguishing it from similarly named journals

Readers should distinguish this journal from the Chinese Journal of Pediatric Surgery (中华小儿外科杂志), the older Chinese Medical Association title published in Beijing with a different ISSN (0253-3006), and from general paediatrics titles such as the Chinese Journal of Contemporary Pediatrics, which is also based in Changsha but covers the whole of child medicine rather than surgery alone. The word "Clinical" in this journal's title, its Hunan sponsorship and its ISSN 1671-6353 are the reliable identifiers. Checking the ISSN remains the simplest way to confirm that a citation, a subscription or a manuscript submission belongs to this journal and not to one of its near-namesakes.

Readership and continuing role

The journal's readers are paediatric surgeons and surgical trainees, together with the neonatologists, anaesthetists, intensivists, radiologists and nurses whose work surrounds an operation on a child. For trainees in particular, a Chinese-language journal reporting large domestic case series is a practical textbook supplement: it shows how conditions present in Chinese hospitals, which operations are actually performed, and what results can honestly be expected. For established surgeons, it is a forum for comparing techniques — open against laparoscopic, one reconstruction against another — on patient numbers that only China's large children's hospitals can assemble.

More than two decades after its founding in 2002, the Journal of Clinical Pediatric Surgery continues to appear in regular monthly issues under the sponsorship of Hunan Children's Hospital, recorded in national statistics and international databases alike. Its role is the classic one for a specialty journal: to convert the daily operative experience of a demanding field — surgery on the smallest and most vulnerable patients — into shared, checkable knowledge for the community that practises it.